Re. cold war combatants who are little better off than before, I would ask that you cite examples. I would be glad to comment. Ditto proxies. I will say that the situation we left the South Vietnamese and some Laotians in shamed us. The stay of funding by the congress resulted in the Paris peace accords being a virtual invitation for the communists to roll south.
I'm not sure any amount of money would have kept the Communists from rolling south by that time. It ain't easy blowing air into a perforated balloon.
How many of the people who disappeared during the anticommunist purges in Latin America, the PI, and many other countries do you think were actually communists, and how many do you think simply had expressed opinions disapproved of by the dictators? Are they not casualties of the Cold War? In this country an entire generation of intelligent, idealistic young people was either driven underground, coopted, or killed, and we are still suffering the consequences today. I suspect that the same situation prevails in many other countries.
Many of these people were not Communists, just potential rivals to individuals in power. When you suspend law to conduct a crusade, it is very easy for unprincipled allies to use that crusade to settle scores that have nothing to do with it.
What about the money that was lent to sustain the pork barrels of people like Marcos when foreign aid became politically unacceptable? We knew perfectly well that money was being sent to people who were not investing it in any profitable enterprise, and that the government would never be able to honor the guarantees. We kept the pipeline open because without it the regimes would have crumbled, and the people in these countries are still paying it back. Quite a number of billions there, is it really fair to not only impose a dictator on people who don't want him, but expect them to pick up the tab for keeping him in power?
A lot of people were forced to take sides in a fight that was not really theirs, and a lot of them suffered badly because of it. The idea of ignoring them when the fight is over seems somehow less than honorable to me. |
